Shared Vocabulary a foundation for business architecture

Posted by William Ulrich on Thursday, October 6, 2011 - 12:29

Total votes: 0

In Diana Krohn's new article, Terminology Wars: Coming to Terms with our Terms (see link below), she discusses the importance of terminology and vocabulary. If I were state what I believe to be the most important principle of business, it is that of a common vocabulary. This concept applies to capability, value, information and organization mapping. Take a look at DIana's article on the topic and let me know what you think.

http://www.bpminstitute.org/articles/article/article/terminology-wars-co...

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Joseph Lail
, Chief Architect, Raytheon Missile Systems
posted 1 year 31 weeks ago
Good points, and Diana has given a good overview of the excellent Business Architecture work at United Airlines at some recent symposia. We see the lexicon issues as one driver for knowing up front how much time to spend on each layer of the Business Architecture. If the Capability Mapping level can be navigated for a strategic initiative within days or (at most) weeks, then a blitz exercise can quickly define the capabilities touched (through a heat map or similar method), the scope, environmental/policy restrictions, key stakeholders, then the description of the new integrated process and metrics. The organization gets a big boost once ready to focus on the new integrated business process model (this is where it's worth spending the weeks or months it takes), because there is only one right answer on terminology, and that's BPMN 2.0 (http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/). It's not only where the rubber meets the road in explicitly modeling the new roles, events (metrics), and process logic executed in services, it's also the level where we have a globally-recognized, vendor-neutral, common terminology for the business process itself across siloed functions.

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